Giovanni Sottocornola

Venditrice di frutta, 1886 ca. (Fondazione Cariplo)

Giovanni Sottocornola (Milan, 1855–1917) was an Italian painter.

Biography

It was in 1875 that Giovanni Sottocornola, a painter of humble origins, enrolled at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where he attended the courses of Raffaele Casnedi and Giuseppe Bertini until 1880 and met his fellow students Gaetano Previati, Emilio Longoni and Giovanni Segantini. While the portraits and still lifes presented at the Brera exhibitions of the following years enjoyed considerable success on the art market, he began to address social themes early in the new decade and experimented with the Divisionist technique in paintings like The Worker’s Dawn (1897, Milan, Galleria d’Arte Moderna). Later years saw a return to portraiture as well as genre scenes inspired by family feeling and landscapes painted during stays in the pre-Alpine area of Lombardy. A participant in Milanese and Venetian exhibitions, he combined teaching and restoration with painting.

References

• Laura Casone, Giovanni Sottocornola, online catalogue Artgate by Fondazione Cariplo, 2010, CC BY-SA (source for the first revision of this article).

Other projects

Media related to Giovanni Sottocornola at Wikimedia Commons